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Richard Zach et al. logic textbooks are a work of art: https://slc.openlogicproject.org https://slc.openlogicproject.org. Aside, I'd be happy to pay for great

by nextos 2y ago

Richard Zach et al. logic textbooks are a work of art: https://slc.openlogicproject.org https://slc.openlogicproject.org. Aside, I'd be happy to pay for great classic math textbooks in a well typeset edition. Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces is one such example. The text is fantastic, but everything is too cramped and hard to read compared to a modern book from the 1970s onward. A newer edition typeset in LaTeX would be great.

TimorousBestie 2y ago
By my estimation, it’ll hit the public domain in 2053. Not that long of a wait, and in any case math typesetting should be much improved by then.
- nextos 2y ago
  2053 is pretty far. I wish Dover, who hold publication rights, improved typesetting of this and a few other classic textbooks. It's probably not hard to use an LLM to do the bulk of the conversion to TeX work cheaply, and then some human input to polish the final document and fix errors.
  - graymatters 2y ago
    2053 is too far away indeed. “It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.
    - nextos 2y ago
      Have you tried image to LaTeX translation? It works fairly well already for text plus equations. I've done this for a 30-page manuscript with no sources, and I was able to recreate the entire document with minimal manual intervention to get a correct PDF. This is not programming, it's OCR and translation to a very simple markup language. It's a very easy mechanical task.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JadeNB 2y ago
There was a project a while ago to do exactly this (in general, not for Halmos's book specifically. I assume that's the one you mean). I can't find it by Googling, but here's an Internet Archive capture of a Project Gutenberg page that collected books for which this had been done: https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_(Bookshelf) https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.guten... .

by nextos 2y ago

TimorousBestie 2y ago

By my estimation, it’ll hit the public domain in 2053. Not that long of a wait, and in any case math typesetting should be much improved by then.

nextos 2y ago
2053 is pretty far. I wish Dover, who hold publication rights, improved typesetting of this and a few other classic textbooks. It's probably not hard to use an LLM to do the bulk of the conversion to TeX work cheaply, and then some human input to polish the final document and fix errors.
- graymatters 2y ago
  2053 is too far away indeed. “It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.
  - nextos 2y ago
    Have you tried image to LaTeX translation? It works fairly well already for text plus equations. I've done this for a 30-page manuscript with no sources, and I was able to recreate the entire document with minimal manual intervention to get a correct PDF. This is not programming, it's OCR and translation to a very simple markup language. It's a very easy mechanical task.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

JadeNB 2y ago

There was a project a while ago to do exactly this (in general, not for Halmos's book specifically. I assume that's the one you mean). I can't find it by Googling, but here's an Internet Archive capture of a Project Gutenberg page that collected books for which this had been done: https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_(Bookshelf) https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.guten... .